The present disclosure relates generally to managing composite documents and, in particular, to a system and method for electronically managing composite documents for litigation support.
Legal matters often involve large volumes of information that must be organized and categorized in response to particular inquires or issues, such as litigation pleadings, business transactions, government regulations, and other legal matters. The information is typically managed by a centralized organization, such as a legal department or group therein having document coordinators. Managing this legal information often requires organizing both textual information as well as documents.
Current litigation support systems are generally designed to support retrieval of information based on document attributes such as document date, type of document, authors, etc. Therefore, when documents are prepared for loading into litigation support systems, their document composition is defined based on these attributes. For example, a change in document date would signify the start of a new document. However, real-world documents often consist of more than one document unit included as attachments to a leading document. These combined documents are referred to as composite documents in that they include more than one sub-document. In a litigation support system, it is important to keep the context of the original composite document intact including all of its sub-documents. It is also important to allow review and use of the entire document or any of its individual sub-units.
For example, a composite document may comprise ten documents, each one providing results of testing performed on a product for a specific year, whereby the composite spans a ten-year period (e.g., 1991–2000). The test results for each document may be considered independently from the other test results in that they provide useful information for testing performed during a particular one-year period. In addition, the test results may also be useful in the context of the ten year period covered by the collection of documents in evaluating the long-term performance of a product (e.g., pattern spotting).
Litigation support systems typically support the concept of composite documents in that documents and their attachments are tracked in the system. However, they do not provide the ability to present the entire composite document and to allow the user to retrieve, review or otherwise manipulate all or selected sub-document units of the composite documents. It would be desirable for a litigation support system to allow a composite document to be treated as a single document and for each sub-document to be treated as an individual document.